John Bachar; daredevil rock climber plunges to death

John Bachar, a rock climber who inspired awe as a daredevil, condescension as an anachronism and eventually respect as a legend, fell to his death last Sunday from a rock formation near his California home. He was 51.

After years of climbing without protection, sustaining his only major injuries in a car wreck, Mr. Bachar was confirmed dead by the sheriff of Mono County, where he lived in Mammoth Lakes.

“He was an artist,” said Dean Fidelman, a contemporary who had climbed with him for decades. “He transcended the sport.”

Mr. Bachar left his mark across the Yosemite Valley, the worldwide focal point of elite climbing in the 1970s, by making terrifying ascents of spectacular rock formations like El Capitan.

To critics, Mr. Bachar cut a stubborn, self-righteous figure, uncompromising on matters of daring style and minimal gear. To admirers, he represented the vanishing purity of a simpler age, a time when rocks and mountains were to be ascended only from the ground up, without advance rigging. For about half a decade at his prime, Mr. Bachar enjoyed a reputation comparable only to that of Royal Robbins in the 1950s.

“Since Bachar, I don't think there was anybody you could say was the greatest, most influential climber in the world in his time, ” said Pete Mortimer, a Yosemite stalwart known among climbers.

In the early 1970s, Mr. Bachar arrived in the Yosemite Valley with a pair of boots, an alto saxophone and a stunning physique, joining a group of brash young climbers known as the Stonemasters. The big-wall climbing styles of the 1960s were making way for a style known as free climbing, whose practitioners sought to minimize their gear, using ropes only for protection. Mr. Bachar took that kind of self-reliance to levels that could appear dangerous.

“If ever a Stonemaster carried the name on his sleeve (and he scribbled it on his boots as well), it was John Bachar, Grand Templar of the entire movement,” wrote John Long, a founder of the group, in an online history. Mr. Bachar once spent an entire season climbing without using a rope. He offered $10,000 to anyone who could keep up with him for a day. He found no takers.

His exploits soon gained notice in the American Alpine Journal, where one diarist wrote that “his extraordinary free-climbing talent, coupled with an awesome physique, polished by the mental discipline of years of experience, place him at a level few attain.”

As the sport splintered into ever narrower specializations in the 1980s, Mr. Bachar fell from grace among some climbers. Some adapted his unharnessed physical techniques to the safe confines of boulder climbing, while others sought to scale more difficult pitches with bolts and other gear that could sometimes permanently mark the rock formations.

“John never really pushed his ethos on anyone, but because he was so good and made no bones about it, he was often attacked – simply because he represented something so different than the changing mainstream,” said John Middendorf, a climber based in Australia. “He was really quite Zen in this regard.”